Hi Prof_Fanatickus,
Once again, I really appreciate the time you’ve spent here. It is 100% clear you are passionate about this domain, and that is what I love so much about this growing community: the ability to engage with so many diverse and knowledgeable individuals to hopefully find a way to improve the world around us!
To get into a response, I already discussed a lot of this in my post above so I won’t bore you with more personal anecdotes but it’s worth repeating that I disagree with your generalization. I do think the delineation that students are 100% in the beginning, middle and end of this proposal is important to make. This is not direct funding to these universities, it is to University Groups led by students who have a history of contributing to this space, usually in the absence of direct university support. Things are starting to change but very few universities, even top ones, have put much time or effort into supporting or teaching blockchain let alone supporting student groups who have self organized.
I’ll say again: Who has the privilege of accessing these funds and why are they the chosen targets?
To answer your question directly: These university groups are the initial targets because they are organized and have an established history. Anyone who has been involved with a university group knows that they can die every semester that their leadership graduates. Highlighting student groups that have survived and thrived is necessary to create a framework for success at other universities. I fully agree that other schools likely have much more potential, but it is exactly that, potential. If we started off with other universities with no established blockchain group and gave them capital, I think it is much more likely that many of them would not succeed the first year and that would give those on the fence ammunition to shut this initiative down which would be a tragedy. At the end of the day, I really think we are 100% on the same page, it really comes down to order of operations during the bootstrapping phase.
I don’t know if BitDAO would even have a legal avenue to address misuse of these grants as they’re not a widely-recognized legal entity.
Regarding recourse for funding misuse, there is pretty significant social capital at risk if any of these student groups were to misappropriate. I don’t necessarily think suing students or having a path to doing so is the desire of anyone here. This is one of the main reasons we initially went with established blockchain groups as there is some trust needed during this early phase. The check would be that annual funding is distributed in 4 tranches every three months with accounting taking place before each period, limiting the amount at risk for any given period.
Once again, really appreciate your input. Would love to work with you to expand this initiative to be as inclusive as possible. My dream is to have every single university participating in EduDAO, and eventually for education to become completely decentralized, agnostic of physical location or the university that one attends.